I'm not generally a fan of house rules, so I'm going to keep this pretty minimal. But there are a handful that I think will improve this particular campaign, particularly given its sandboxy nature. I'll post those changes here.

Lore skills are fun. They matter rarely enough that it's super satisfying when they do, and you get to say "actually, I happen to be an expert in this particular thing! I've just always been interested." Also, they come up pretty often in Influence encounters and investigations, but only if you have the right ones. So this is going to be my first house rule.

The Lore specialty you get from your background receives automatic improvements in its rank, exactly as though you had gained it with the Additional Lore skill feat (expert at 3rd, master at 7th, legendary at 15th).

If you use a skill increase to improve a Lore specialty, you may gain two increases to different Lore specialties.

Hero Points are meant to work in the in-person format; they're tied to sessions rather than character progress. Obviously this doesn't work well in a forum format. I'm changing it to be based on "Scenes" instead. We'll start a new thread for each scene to make it clear. Everyone is reset to 1 Hero Point at the beginning of the scene. They otherwise work as normal.

The Aid action in the CRB sucks. It's too hard at 1st level, too easy at later levels, and just generally isn't well designed, unless the design objective is "make sure players don't try to do this if there's anything else they could do." But in this adventure, there are many situations in which NPCs might want to give the players a little boost, and this should work without being too hard, too easy, or too automatic. I'm therefore rewriting it to the following version (changes in bold).

AID (Reaction)
You try to help your ally with a task. To use this reaction, you must first prepare to help, usually by using an action during your turn. You must explain to the GM exactly how you’re trying to help, and they determine whether you can Aid your ally.

When you use your Aid reaction, attempt a skill check or attack roll of a type decided by the GM. The typical DC is a Hard DC for the aided character's level, but the GM might adjust this DC for particularly hard or easy tasks. The GM can add any relevant traits to your preparatory action or to your Aid reaction depending on the situation, or even allow you to Aid checks other than skill checks and attack rolls.

Critical Success: You grant your ally a +2 circumstance bonus to the triggering check. If you’re an expert with the check you attempted, the bonus is +3; if you're a master, it's +4; and if you’re legendary, it’s +6.
Success: As Critical Success, but the bonus is half as much (rounded down).
Critical Failure: Your ally takes a –1 circumstance penalty to the triggering check.
This message was last edited by the GM at 01:59, Tue 01 Nov 2022.

The standard flanking rule states that a line drawn through the centers of the two attackers must pass through opposite sides (or corners) of the defender. This really doesn't handle interactions between reach and non-reach weapons very well, especially for corners.

I'm changing it to be: the angle formed by the centers of the two attackers and the defender must be at least 120 degrees. This gives a lot more options, especially for reach fighters or against big targets, as well as ensuring that anyone surrounded by three or more attackers is almost definitely flanked by at least two of them, and maybe all three (which isn't always true with the standard rule).

I can't find much guidance for how much equipment a person can generally carry in such a way that it's accessible with a single Interact action. The first printing had a collection of bags and pouches and other containers, but it was too fiddly and Paizo got rid of it. So I'm just going to set what I think are reasonable limits, and if it doesn't work, we'll adjust it.

Medium characters may have 4 Bulk of weapons or weapon-like items (e.g. shields, wands, musical instruments) sheathed and ready to draw at a moment's notice; small characters may have 3 Bulk. This includes utility items like potions, bombs, scrolls, or religious symbols, most of which have Light bulk so you can fit 10 of them into 1 Bulk. You'll think of some way to strap them to you; the official art includes lots of potion-bandoliers and scroll cases and such.

Additionally, any character may have 2 Bulk of tools (healer's tools, alchemist's tools, repair kits, thieves' tools, &c) worn and ready to draw as part of the action that uses them, unless you're wearing fine clothing, which permits only Light bulk. (This actually is specified, but it's really the only guidance I can find.)

I found 4 or 5 threads about this, with no consensus and no input from Paizo. So I'm just going to have to make a ruling that we can live with, and given that the next time you're going to see any actual civilization is when you've built it yourself, I'm going with a fairly permissive ruling.

Transferring or swapping runes uses the Craft activity, but the setup time is only 1 day of downtime, not 4. The base cost is 10% of the rune being transferred (unless the rune is coming from a runestone, in which case it's free), and it does not require Magical Crafting or a formula. If the rune has a training requirement for the Craft skill, the requirement to transfer it is one rank lower.

Swapping two runes of the same type (potency, other fundamental runes, or property runes) takes the same amount of time as transferring one, and all costs and requirements are based on the higher-level of the two runes in question, except that if the higher-level rune is coming from a runestone, the monetary cost for transferring the other rune must still be paid.

EDIT (5th January): This was specifically addressed in yesterday's errata for the CRB 4th printing, stating that transferring runes does require the Magical Crafting feat (or an equivalent effect), although it's still silent on whether any skill training requirement still holds (however, it is pretty clear that a formula isn't needed). We've already done all of the rune transfers we really needed right now under my original ruling, so it doesn't matter at the moment. For the future, I'll assume that Lena takes expert Crafting and the Magical Crafting feat at 2nd level (as a GMPC), and is forever willing to do these sorts of transfers for you at cost (but not in the field).
This message was last edited by the GM at 05:45, Fri 06 Jan 2023.

This one is just for our friendly neighborhood magus. While I have some sympathy for the position that "you can just hack and slash like a mundane fighter if casting spells in melee will get you killed," it still seems pretty lame to make the class's defining ability so dangerous to use in real life. It's not as though Spellstrike is so powerful that it needs onerous restrictions either; it's already hard enough to use and isn't really that powerful! So here you go:

All spell component actions used as part of a Spellstrike have the concentrate trait instead of the manipulate trait. Any spell attack performed as part of a Spellstrike is the same kind (melee or ranged) as the weapon Strike, even if the spell normally uses the other kind.

This means that you are safe from enemies who have the normal Attack of Opportunity ability (unless you're a Starlit Span magus who does a Spellstrike with their bow in melee, for some reason), but rare enemies that can react to concentrate actions can still punish you.

This one is an official alternate rule; we'll be using it.

Instead of getting four different ability boosts at 5th level (10th, 15th, 20th), you get one ability boost at each of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th level (correspondingly 7th-10th, &c). You can't repeat an ability across each set of boosts, so you end up in the same place at 5th level; you just got there more gradually.

This tends to increase your secondary abilities sooner, which gives you more well-rounded characters especially at low levels (there's no point increasing your primary ability early, everyone already has 18 for that).
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:05, Wed 14 Dec 2022.

If you've been following some recent news from Paizo, you may have seen rumors of the Pathfinder Second Edition Remaster. We'll be adopting the vast majority of these changes for this campaign (especially after the new Player Core is released in November, which will presumably come with a lot of updates in the online Archive of Nethys), because they make almost no difference in actual gameplay. There are a lot of terminology changes and several spells received changed names (as a sort of poor man's protection from law, no doubt), and there seem to be some relatively slight balance changes. The only one I noticed in the preview that actually make a difference are as follows:

• Produce flame Ignition now deals d6s instead of d4s if used as a melee spell, which is a nice buff for Booker (and Dubh, I suppose), although it no longer includes the casting stat in the damage, which seems like a shame.
• In some cases, characters gained a focus spell without also increasing their focus pool; these are all now regularized, so that your focus pool is always the same as the number of focus spells (not cantrips) you know, to a maximum of 3 points. I think the only real change here is that Dubh will now have 2 focus points, like Booker and Wilkezag. (It's not clear how focus points work for psychics who only use them for amping their focus cantrips, but for now we'll continue with Booker having 2 focus points since it seems to work well enough.)
• Along with focus point rebalancing, characters can now Refocus repeatedly, without having to spend focus points in between. (This is a kind of stealthy change and it's not at all obvious to me that it was intended; we'll see in November if it stays.) Expect me to start surprising you in the middle of your 30-minute rest if you do this a lot. There are changes to the "improved refocus" feats but we won't be reaching those for a long time anyway.
• Alignment and mechanisms that use it no longer exist. It was always a kind of creaky system anyway. All aligned damage (along with a handful of other effects) is now combined into a single concept of "spirit damage", which target's a victim's inherent being. Creatures that really depended on their good or evil nature (celestials, fiends, undead, &c) now have the "holy" or "unholy" traits, which give them a lot of the same effects; devoted characters like clerics or champions can (or in some cases must) choose to gain these traits, along with their associated benefits and risks.
• Spells are arranged into "ranks", because someone finally looked up the word "level" in a thesaurus.
• Attack of Opportunity is now called Reactive Strike; it's otherwise the same.
• Spell schools (enchantment, divination, necromancy, &c) no longer exist, although illusions still have some special rules related to disbelief. Wizards now have a specialization based on the actual academy (or "school") they attended as teenagers, which gives them a similar effect to the old school specialization.
• Talismans are expected to become more useful in general, but details will likely remain scarce until November.
• This will be a departure from the remaster, caused by the very early setting of this campaign: metal armor is still anathema for druids in this campaign, unless it goes on for MUCH more in-game time than I expect. Ranginori and the other kindly Elemental Lords are still trapped in their various prisons for eight or nine more years, and the Planes of Metal and Wood have not yet returned to the cosmos. I don't think this will really cause Dubh any problems: surely, you weren't planning to buy a chain shirt anyway!

This message was last edited by the GM at 01:43, Fri 18 Aug 2023.

All right, I got into an argument on the Paizo forums about this one, without much resolution nor any guidance from Paizo. The Weapon Infusion feat allows a kineticist to add any of a collection of traits to their melee Elemental Blasts, and yes, Telric took it. The problem is: most of the traits do absolutely nothing as written, and even if you accept a slightly more permissive reading that considers all Elemental Blasts to be treated as a single "weapon", Backswing and Sweep are still always, always worse than Agile. (Ranged Blasts are just fine, and Weapon Infusion works quite well for them. I'm pretty sure Telric took this feat mostly to add Thrown to his ranged blasts because it's very very good for him, and if so, that's just fine! But really, the entire feat ought to work properly.)

Under the theory that abilities should do something, especially abilities with costs as heavy as a class feat, I am therefore taking an extremely permissive approach to this one, along the lines of my final suggestion in that thread. If you use Weapon Infusion to add Backswing, Forceful, or Sweep to your first Elemental Blast in a turn, later Blasts that round benefit from the effects of the trait you added (as appropriate), even if you choose to add a different trait to the later Blasts. Note that this still doesn't mean you can stack Backswing and Sweep as both grant circumstance bonuses to the same thing; but it does mean you can stack Backswing or Sweep with Agile, which is pretty good. The third (and fourth) Blast in a turn can only benefit from the greater effect of Forceful if both of the first two Blasts provide it.

We'll keep an eye on this for a while. If Telric seems too effective (in particular, if he consistently has better attack bonuses or significantly better damage than Sophia, who should be the best), I may change my mind.
This message was last edited by the GM at 05:16, Mon 11 Sept 2023.